Mikey Madison enjoying new star status at the Golden Globes (Getty Images)
By Dominique Paul Noth
One of the most award-winning films of 2024 – now getting both an Oscar best film nod and best actress nod – is assuredly high-energy and familiar in idea, if not in name -- eye-catching actors in a romantic bedroom romp that turns into a Keystone Kops chase drama.
It actually opened in November but has a mixed record in theater screen time.
It’s a Cinderella tale of wealth-flouting youth and the working stiffs they allow into their privileged atmosphere of raunchy sex, sugar candy, fancy parties and frank behavior. The twist is how much we want to care for the central hottie, who seems in control at first but is emotionally whipsawed by this bullying world.
If this was simply being offered as a star-making vehicle for actress Mikey Madison, with her expressive face and courtesan appeal, I would understand. If it was to simply create, as many of director Sean Baker’s films do, empathy and understanding for sex workers in our topsy-turvy world, I also say yes.
But a best picture Oscar for Anora? Not from me.
I think much of the positive reaction to Anora is how it legitimizes the methods of the adult movie to explore the romantic sex comedy genre. It doesn’t break new cinematic ground, but it is expert updating old-fashioned methods. Any coyness in depicting Julia Roberts’ actual livelihood in “Pretty Woman” (1990) has vanished.
The film turns randy spunkiness into a virtue. It lets us fume at how married rich grownups interfere with the excesses of youth. But even though the manners of the wealthy are buffoonish and overbearing, we the audience are also being asked to embrace the shallow.
Anora, who prefers to be known as Annie (Ani), is a lap dancer (and more) at a New York club loaded with girls for hire and riddled with locked doors and peep rooms, where she makes a lot of money. Since she speaks some Russian, she is invited to entertain Ivan, who acts 15 but is actually 21.
Ivan is the wayward son of a rich Russian oligarch. Even while sexually smitten, he incessantly plays video games, vapes, snorts drugs and drinks. But he also takes Ani to Las Vegas to marry her.
At which point the outraged family steps in, led by an American-based fixer (a cussing Armenian priest) and his two thugs. They all look and act like the Russian Mafia but are mainly stumblebums. Confronted with his childish behavior, Ivan runs off to get intoxicated, leaving Ani to defend the marriage and endure the thugs (one of whom, played nicely by Yura Borisov, begins to feel affection – what red-blooded man wouldn’t).
This is where the film shifts the appeal of Ani from voyeurism to a put-upon woman speaking her mind to a cruel world. As if we hadn’t seen this coming.
I’m fine with the film elevating Mikey Madison. A lot of films are fantasies. But this one is playing hard and loose with a real world.
About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff.
He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly.
A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
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